Beneath The Crimson And Gold
by Our-Lady-Of-The-North
Summary: What if Lord Walder Frey kept Lady Catelyn Stark hostage? AU set after the Red Wedding, beginning from Jaime's journey back to King's Landing.
1. JAIME

JAIME

I

He dreamed of his family again that night.

Beneath the stars, by the flames that licked at the darkness, Jaime dreamed that same dream, of his sister and of his father, as gold and fair as the flickering torch she held in her fingers. They stood beside each other as they always did, watching him. "Your place." Their voices echoed in the song of a thousand other voices, each saying the same thing. "Your place."

"Cersei," Jaime whispered. His throat was dry as he grew weaker. "Sister..."

Her emerald irises gazed at him. "Your place," she repeated. "This is your place, now. You don't belong with us anymore. You don't belong with me anymore." And then, she began to fade away, along with his father. Jaime tried to reach for her; he watched his hand grasp at the air as if she were close. Near. But everything faded. Even the hand he used to reach for her began to disappear. The ash of his desintegrating fingers blew about around him. Jaime did not see them move in the air; he only knew. He had never known such a darkness.

_They cut off my hand_, he remembered. _There is nothing left. Ash. But there hadn't been any ash...just nothing. Nothing._

Jaime didn't dream of Brienne that night like he had done before returning to Harrenhal, or the five white knights who had once called him brother; only of his father, the great Lord Tywin, and his sister, the Queen, and then of waves of doom that took him.

When he opened his eyes, he did not jerk, he did not even scream. But the sky wept her rain down on him, and Jaime thought to weep, but he couldn't. _Nothing_, he thought again. He felt like nothing.

The fire had died hours past as he lay on the wet dirt, breathing in the night. Everything was silence in slumber. But then Jaime heard the whinnies of horses, many horses, and the firing of arrows, the slicing of a sword cutting through skin. He came to his feet and looked frantically for Brienne. "Brienne," he shouted, searching through the darkness. He must have tripped because then he was on the ground. "Brienne," he continued. He had found her.

She looked at him with her big and beautiful eyes.

"Run," he said. "Run. We're under attack. Run!" And then they were running. Jaime's feet pounded against the earth as quickly as his heart pounded against his chest, running and beating, running and beating. They rummaged through the woods, the arms of trees and bushes stretched out towards him as if to reach for him like he had done Cersei. But they didn't fade, only smashed as his body collided into them, the shreds of wood flying into the air as they broke. "Faster," he said, not to Brienne who was in front of him, but to himself. "You have to move faster."

After a while they stopped. Panting and out of breath, Brienne spoke. "Who was it? Who was attacking us?"

Jaime didn't answer. The cries of crows and the hoots of owls became her reply.

"Who was that?" the Tarth maiden asked again. It was the last thing she had said to Jaime before they had become surrounded, by dark horses and armoured men with silver swords. Had Vargo Hoat come to take vengeance for his dead bear? Or was this someone else entirely? Jaime knew nothing at that moment, only the familiar blackness his mind returned to as the hilt of a sword hit the back of his skull.

When he woke, Jaime was being dragged. They had had to carry him most of the way there, whoever they were, and did not seem too happy about it. His toes trailed across the cold floor, his wrists once again in shackles, the armoured men threw him into what seemed like a prison cell. "You have company," one of them grunted, before slamming the cell door shut and locking it.

For the first time in a long time Jaime felt somewhat surprised by what his eyes saw. "I thought you were dead," he mumbled to her. She was much thinner than the last he saw her, weaker, but her hair still shone bright red. And he looked at her, into the eyes of Catelyn Stark.


	2. CATELYN

CATELYN  
II

She stared into his emerald eyes, the flickers of fire glistening in those irises from the flaming torch lit outside their cell. She saw nothing but a confusion. And it made her wonder-had he truly not known?

"I thought you were dead," he said again. This time, there was no humour in his voice. All of that had faded away. "Slain at that horrid wedding, they said you were. Now, enlighten me, Lady Stark, why would they lie about that?" Catelyn didn't answer him. "Unless they didn't know you're still alive?" He almost laughed, though nothing was funny.

This time, Catelyn did answer. "They know I'm alive," she said. "It was your father that ochestrated my capture in the first place."  
"And is your son still alive?" the Kingslayer asked. Catelyn knew Ser Jaime knew the answer to that question and yet he asked anyway. _"The King of The North!_" he roared when she did not respond, like the lion of his house and banner. He turned to look back at Catelyn, looking her deep in the eyes, and he leaned forward. "Is he still hiding beneath those skirts of yours?"

_"No._" That was what Catelyn said. If she had been out of her chains, her hands would have been around his throat by now. She would kill him if she had had the chance, and if she had known everything would have come to this, she would killed him a long time ago. "The king is dead."

There was no other way to put it. She could find no words to make the sentence sound less painful; it was all and everything that had to be said.

"The war finally took him,"

"The war finally took him," she repeated.

"You see, that is what war does to you." His eyes grew distant. "It takes you. But before then, it can either make you stronger, bring the worrior out of you, the lions and wolves and bears out of you."

"_Or?_" Catelyn asked.

Jaime breathed. "Or it can break you. Did this war _break_ him?"

Jaime was staring at her, with eyes as bright as the gold brought from Lannisport, waiting for her answer. At first, she didn't know what to say, or how to answer. Her only reply was made from the gaze she returned him, until she spoke. "My son was never broken by this war._ Never_."

"No," he whispered. "Because he had found the courtesy to be broken by his love first."

Catelyn pulled at her chains. She clawed for his face, but fell forward short. All she could hear was his quiet laughter.

A rage boiled from within her, the her heart had suddenly been ignited into hot flames. She thought she would scream, shout in her anger. Perhaps it would relieve her of aching soul as it was that she kept everything bottled up that ached her so.

"It broke you too, didn't it?" Catelyn didn't look at Ser Jaime, but she listened to his words. "But not when your two sons died, the small wild one and the broken boy. No. You didn't break then. When they stabbed your king in the heart, that was when the war broke you." His voice was hoarse and hard for Catelyn to listen to, but his words were filled with a certain wisdom. "When they cut off my hand, that was when they broke me."

He lifted his stump towards Catelyn, and then looked at it himself.

"It used to hurt, you know." His voice was a mere whisper. "But now, I feel no pain." Suddenly, he began hammering his stump against the wall of the cell, hitting and hitting it against the cold concrete. "No pain at all," he said. He continued to hit his stump, but his eyes remained on her face. That was when he smiled.

The turnkey forced the gate open. He spat on the ground, before grabbing Ser Jaime by his rags. He had him pinned against the wall, he breath on his face. "_You want to die, Kingslayer?_" he said almost like a child. "You want to _die?_" he spat Ser Jaime's way again.

Catelyn stared at both figures before her in the near-darkness. Her eyes widened. She felt something coiled in her system, something she hadn't felt in a long. She had always thought after Robb's death her heart had turned to stone. But not now. She looked at them, and felt her body tense in fear.

"_Do you wish to die, KINGSLAYER?!_" the turnkey continued to scream, as if they were the only words he had ever known.

"No." Jaime gasped. It was then, he smashed him brow into the turnkey's. The turnkey staggered back, holding hiss head with his hands, screaming in pain.

"You_ will_ die," the guard hissed. He tackled Jaime's body to the ground, battering at his face. Jaime was already bleeding, from his nose and from his mouth. Yet he managed to turn his back to the guard and force him into the wall, away from him. Using his left hand, he tried to grab for the turnkey's head, to perhaps hit it, but Catelyn saw that he was already weak. The Golden knight was not the man that had once visited her in Winterfell.

They struggled. Jaime kept tripping in the shackles of his ankles, stumbling into the ground like a fool.

By now, Catelyn was tugging at her chains. _You fool!_ she thought. _You damned fool! No gold or god will save you!_ They were the thoughts of her mind, though she did not stop tugging. Breathless and sweaty, she would look across to find Jaime hitting the man. She thought for a brief moment that perhaps he would win; the turnkey looked like no knight. But Jaime looked like no knight either. And then, the tables would turn, and the guard would be winning.

_"THE SWORD!_" Catelyn screamed, as she caught sight of steel. And with that, Jaime lunged for the blade with his left hand and smashed the hilt into the guard's nose. Their faces were more blood than skin now. Jaime ran for him, steel in red fingers, and forced the blade through the apple of the turnkey's neck. The blood poured from the open wound like wine, and the dead body fell to the floor.

"You _fool!_" Catelyn shouted at Jaime. He only laughed, and took the silver keys from the body's belt, unlocking his own chains at first, and then Catelyn's.  
"Why are you helping me?"she asked, confused.

"We're both prisoners here," Jaime replied. He looked at the body on the ground, laid in the pool of his own blood.

"You will die," that was what the turnkey had said to him. And "No. No I won't," that was what Jaime said.


End file.
